Saving COVID Patients or Neoliberalism? Uruguay and the Rhetoric of Crisis

• In Event: Neoliberalism and Governance in the Global South

Abstract

As Covid-19 continues to spread and both expose and deepen economic, racial, and health inequalities across the Global North, a few countries in the so-called “Global South” have more successfully controlled the pandemic without the need for drastic lockdowns. A prime example is Uruguay, where scientific readiness, rapid and popularly supported government action, and a robust public health system have combined to produce enviable infection and mortality rates.
Nonetheless, the pandemic has still exposed the structural inequalities produced by neoliberalism in Uruguay. These were not fully addressed by previous social-democratic governments and are likely to become more pronounced under the new right-wing administration, which remains committed to austerity.
Perhaps ironically, in this context, Uruguay’s government is using its sanitary success—which was only possible due to its relatively robust public sector—to push for spending cuts, thus leaving the most vulnerable at even higher risk.
This paper examines how social-democratic investment in public goods allowed Uruguay to relatively successfully control the spread of the virus, but also how the pandemic has highlighted the structural inequalities produced by the country’s neoliberal model.
In turn, this paper analyzes how the government has leveraged its handling of the “crisis” to pursue the same austerity measures that have rendered other societies, in Latin America and beyond, so ill-equipped to withstand the pandemic. In other words, the Uruguayan case reveals how the pandemic, which has exposed the failure of neoliberalism, is being used to deepen an especially pernicious form of neoliberal economic and social governance.

Author

• Sebastian Sclofsky, CSU, Stanislaus